Reply I to "Comment on 'Some implications of the quantum nature of laser fields for quantum computations' "

We show that Itano's arguments confirm our conclusion, that entanglement of the atom with the laser field contributes a small but nonzero amount to the total decoherence of an atom in a laser field. This small effect scales as 1/(n) over bar with (n) over bar the average number of photons in the laser pulse.